Every year as the AERA convention approaches, Rick Hess writes a column poking fun at some silly-sounding titles in the program. Hess's point seems to be "Is any of this really going to help kids learn better?" (That's my summary, not his.)

I respect Hess, but I think he misses the more interesting point here.Hess's real beef, I suggest, is not with the AERA, but with schools of education, and with all education researchers.

Putting researchers from very different disciplines--history, critical theory, economics, psychology, etc.--in one school because they all study "education" sounds like a good idea. The problem is that it doesn't lead to a beautiful flowering of interdisciplinary research. Researchers ignore one another.

Why? Because these researchers start with different assumptions. They set different goals for education. They have different standards of evidence. They even have different senses of what it means to "know" something. So mostly they don't conduct interdisciplinary research. Mostly they ignore one another.

No, the Foucault crowd is not going to improve science education in the next ten years. The wheel on which the Humanities turns revolves much more slowly and less visibly than the cycle of the sciences. I admit I only dimly understand what they are up to, but I nevertheless believe they have a contribution to make.

But the fault lies not just with schools of education for sticking these varied researchers in one building. A perhaps more significant problem is that there is little sense among education researchers that their particular training leads to expertise well suited to addressing certain problems and ill-suited to other problems. I think that education researchers would be smart to stake out their territory "We have methods that will help solve these problems."

Too often we forget our limitations. (I named this blog "Science and Education" to remind myself that, although I'll be tempted, I should not start mouthing off about policy, but should leave that to people like Rick who understand it much more deeply.) When the charter school affiliated with Stanford was in trouble a year or two ago, how many education researchers lacked an opinion? And how many of those opinions were really well informed?

Education research would look less silly if all of us made clear what we were up to, and stuck to it.